Japan's department store basement food halls are unlike anything else I know. "Food hall" undersells it.

Prepared dishes, bento boxes, sushi, tempura, wagashi, patisserie, cheese, wine, pickles, dashi — each counter operating according to its own grammar, its own standards. Every vendor takes their work seriously, and that seriousness accumulates into something you can feel.

Premium wagashi sit beside five-hundred-yen side dishes. Regional food fairs rotate through regularly — Hokkaido one week, Kyushu the next — bringing the geography of the whole country underground.

Come in the early evening, pick up dinner, and leave feeling as though you've just circled a world food exposition. Which, in a way, you have.

For most of the year, the rooftop of a Japanese department store is an afterthought. A few rides for children, a vending machine, a view nobody sought out. Then summer arrives, and the place transforms.

Tables appear. Beer taps are installed. The city spreads out below, and for a few hours on a weekday evening, something quietly extraordinary happens in a space that has no reason to be extraordinary.

There is an air-pocket quality to a rooftop beer garden. You take an elevator, the doors open, and the logic of the building below no longer applies. The crowd is local — colleagues after work, couples, regulars who have clearly been coming to the same spot for years.

It is not a sophisticated experience. That is precisely the point.

The Shuto Expressway was built for the 1964 Olympics, threaded through a city that was already dense, with nowhere to go but up — or under.

Driving it is unlike any other expressway. You are up among the buildings one moment, in a tunnel the next, then over water — the Aqua-Line extends the network across Tokyo Bay, so that what began as a city drive ends, improbably, in the middle of the sea. Sharp curves appear with little warning. The speed limit is low, the merges short. It asks for your attention, which is part of why it is interesting.

At night, the city dissolves into light — harbour cranes, factory glow, the streaks of other cars. The expressway turns out to be one of the better places from which to feel the scale of what Tokyo actually is.

Ninety minutes from Tokyo, the road climbs through the mountains and descends into a basin — Mount Fuji to the south on a clear day, the Southern Alps to the west. It looks like wine country because it is.

Around 30 wineries are concentrated in the area today — from large historic producers to family-run estates where the person pouring your wine probably pruned the vines.

A day here can comfortably include three or four wineries. The better approach is to choose deliberately: one large producer for context, one small family winery for conversation, one with a good terrace for lunch.

Having a car matters because the freedom to stop when something catches your eye is part of what makes the day worthwhile.

The industrial zone lining Tokyo Bay south of the city is one of the densest concentrations of heavy industry in Japan — refineries, chemical plants, power stations, steelworks, all operating through the night. The light is incidental.

Higashi-Ogishima East Park gives direct views across the water to the plant clusters of Ukishima and Chidori-cho, with flare stacks burning off gas above the waterline. The Shuto Expressway's Kawasaki line passes through the zone — factories close enough on both sides to feel like a set from something. Chidori-cho, where freight railway tracks run alongside chemical plants, is where most photographers come — winter nights, when steam from the stacks catches the light, are particularly striking.

Thirty minutes from Tokyo, this works well as an evening extension of a day in the city.

For sea swimming with genuinely clear water, the Izu Peninsula is worth the longer drive. The western coast — facing Suruga Bay rather than the open Pacific — tends to be calmer and less visited. There are dozens of small beaches along this coastline, many little-known outside the region.

My own preference is Heda, a fishing village at the northern tip of the peninsula. The bay is protected, the water transparent, and on clear days Mount Fuji appears directly across the water — the silhouette Hokusai spent a lifetime drawing, now with swimmers in the foreground that he never painted. The local restaurants serve whatever the boats brought in that morning. A late lunch after a morning in the water, then a short drive to one of the area's small onsen, makes for a day that's hard to improve on.

These two pottery towns sit thirty minutes apart in the hills north of Tokyo. Kasama came first — its kilns date to the eighteenth century. In the mid-nineteenth century, a potter who trained there moved across the prefectural border and established a kiln in Mashiko.

Mashiko's character was shaped by Hamada Shoji, one of the founders of the Mingei movement. Hamada attracted generations of potters who came to work in that spirit. The aesthetic that resulted is earthy, substantial, and unpretentious — the kind of pottery that looks right on a kitchen table.

Kasama developed along different lines. After the war, the town recruited artists from across Japan and beyond. There is no single Kasama style.

Both towns are worth a day. Together, they make a good one.

There are two roads. The Subaru Line climbs the northern flank from the Fuji Five Lakes area, reaching 2,305 metres above sea level. The Skyline approaches from the south, with views over Suruga Bay opening out as you climb. Both pass through the treeline and arrive at a high, exposed plateau where the temperature can be fifteen degrees cooler than at the base.

During the official climbing season in summer, private vehicles are restricted on both roads. The shoulder seasons — late spring and autumn — are the better time.

The fifth station works well as part of a longer day — the Fuji Five Lakes below, onsen in both directions. You start at sea level, spend an hour above the clouds, and end in a hot bath looking up at the mountain you were standing on that morning.

If you've spent time in this world elsewhere — a party in a forest in Germany, something on a beach in Portugal — you probably already know the feeling.

The same scene exists in Japan. A campsite on a plateau in the Japanese Alps at 1,300 metres. A forest clearing in the hills west of Tokyo. A park on the edge of the Kawasaki industrial waterfront, with refinery towers lit up across the water.

The difficulty is getting in — not in the sense of a door or a list, but in the sense that if you don't know anyone, you probably won't know when something is happening. That's where I come in. Get in touch before your trip. I can't guarantee timing will work, but if something lines up, we can go together.